Before placing templates on a page it is worthwhile to cast a critical eye over the page to determine whether it should in fact be included in Wikipedia. Some articles can be tagged for speedy deletion or marked as an article for deletion.

Some of the reference types below use named fields (such as Title=Electric Power Monthly). In these references, you must use the exact field name (capitalization matters). Fields are separated with pipe (|) characters. The order of the fields does not matter.

Citation templates are used to format citations in a consistent way, as an alternative to formatting the citations by hand. The use of citation templates is neither encouraged nor discouraged. Templates may be used or removed at the discretion of individual editors, subject to agreement with other editors on the article. Because templates can be contentious, editors should not add citation templates, or change an article with a consistent citation format to another, without gaining consensus; see WP:CITECONSENSUS and WP:CITEVAR. The various citation templates below may be freely mixed, since they all produce a similar format.

For a citation to appear in a footnote, it needs to be enclosed in "ref" tags. You can add these by typing <ref> at the front of the citation and </ref> at the end. Alternatively you may notice above the edit box there is a row of "markup" formatting buttons which include a <ref></ref> button to the right—if you highlight your whole citation and then click this markup button, it will automatically enclose your citation in ref tags (i.e. <ref>citation</ref>).

Note, if this is a new page or if there are not already references previously cited, it is necessary to create a section usually named "Notes" or "References" near the end of the page; see WP:FNNR and MOS:APPENDIX for more information on section names:

Optionally, one may add the name attribute by using <ref name="name">details of the citation</ref>. Thereafter, the same footnote may be used multiple times by adding <ref name="name" />. Note that named references begin with <ref instead of the usual <ref>.

When an article cites many different pages from the same source, most Wikipedia editors have chosen to use shortened footnotes (see Shortened footnotes). An alternative method is to use the template {{rp}}.

{{Citation}} creates a citation in the same format as most of the উদ্ধৃতি শৈলী ১ templates, except that the periods are replaced with commas and there is no final period. A complete list of templates that are mimicked by {{citation}} can be found at {{citation/core}}. The parameters |separator=|postscript= (available for most templates) can also be used to affect the punctuation.

Wikipedia does not dictate a particular way to insert citations into an article. As a result, there are multiple ways to structure citations in an article; multiple ways to insert individual citations; and multiple ways to link short-form inline citations with the full-form citations in the bibliography, when using a style that calls for short-form citations.

There are three primary ways to format individual citations:

By hand. When using inline citations (see below), these are simply typed directly; however, when using shortened footnotes or parenthetical references, these can be surrounded with {{wikicite}} to ensure that the appropriate shortened references are linked to the full references below.

The উদ্ধৃতি শৈলী ১ templates produce citations with individual sections (e.g. title, author, publisher, etc.) separated by periods, with a trailing period, while {{Citation}} separates sections with a comma and has no trailing punctuation. (However, this can be changed using the |separator= and |postscript= parameters.)

Not all উদ্ধৃতি শৈলী ১ templates can easily be replaced by the {{Citation}} template. Generally, any উদ্ধৃতি শৈলী ১ template of a general nature (e.g. book; web site; journal or newspaper article; article in an edited collection or encyclopedia; etc.) can be replaced, but specialized templates (court cases, comic books, video games, etc.) cannot very easily.

Some of the parameter names differ. For example, citing an article in an edited collection uses the misnamed {{cite encyclopedia}} template, with |title= for the article name and |encyclopedia= for the collection name; the equivalent parameters in {{Citation}} are named contribution and title, respectively.

When using parenthetical referencing, a Harv templates template that identifies a citation by author and year will automatically link to the appropriate citation elsewhere in the article if created using {{Citation}}. If created using উদ্ধৃতি শৈলী ১, however, a |ref=harv parameter must be added.

There are also at least three ways to structure citations as a whole in an article:

Inline citations. These simply place the citation inside of a <ref>...</ref> reference, which inserts a small bracketed, superscripted number. When clicked on, it links to a correspondingly-numbered footnote (more properly an endnote) placed elsewhere in the article. The footnotes themselves are inserted using {{reflist}}, which is typically placed by itself in a Notes (or References) section near the end of the article. When there are multiple references to the same citation, typing can be saved by using <ref name="foo">...</ref> the first time, and just <ref name="foo"/> elsewhere. When there are citations that differ only in page number, there are two alternatives: write all the citations out in full, including the page number, or use one citation without page numbers along with the {{rp}} template to add an inline page number after the small bracketed footnote number.

Shortened footnotes. Instead of the full-form citation appearing in the footnote, a shortened form appears, giving only the author and year (or in some styles, a shortened version of the article or book title), and page number if appropriate. The full citation appears later on, in a bibliography section. This usually follows directly after the footnotes, is titled "References" or "Bibliography", and contains all relevant citations, listed in alphabetical order. This style is especially appropriate when there are large numbers of references overall and frequent cases of multiple references to the same work, especially in the presence of differing page numbers.

Parenthetical references. These are conceptually similar to shortened footnotes, but the shortened reference appears inline in the text, in parentheses, rather than in a footnote.

When using shortened footnotes or parenthetical references, there are multiple ways to link the shortened and full-form references:

Don't link them. This happens by default when the shortened references are typed in by hand.

Insert manual links. These look like e.g. [[#refPereira2006|Pereira 2006, p. 25]]. The anchor #refPereira2006 is attached to the full-form citation by surrounding it with {{wikicite}} (if inserted by hand), or adding a |ref= parameter to the citation template.

Insert links using a Harv templates template, e.g. {{Harvnb|Pereira|2006|p=25}}. This will insert "Pereira 2006, পৃ. 25" into the text and link it to the citation with the corresponding last name and year. As mentioned above, when using a উদ্ধৃতি শৈলী ১ template, the parameter |ref=harv must be added, but this is unnecessary for {{Citation}}. When using parenthetical references, the plain {{Harv}} template is used, which automatically inserts parentheses. Other variations format the page number or parentheses differently.

Use the {{sfn}} template for the whole of the footnote. The {{sfn}} template creates its own named <ref>...</ref> tags: {{sfn|Pereira|2006|p=25}} is exactly equivalent to <ref name=FOOTNOTEPereira200625>[[#CITEREFPereira2006|Pereira 2006]], p. 25.</ref> which is itself equivalent to <ref name=FOOTNOTEPereira200625>{{Harvnb|Pereira|2006|p=25}}</ref>.